New models predicting where to find fossils

Friday, April 8th, 2016

An international team of scientists have developed a way to help
locate fossils of long-extinct animals.

Using the estimated ages and spatial distribution of Australian
megafauna fossils, the team from University of Adelaide in
Australia and Kiel University in Germany built a series of
mathematical models to determine the areas in the country most
likely to contain fossils.

Published in PLOS ONE, the models were developed for
Australia but the researchers provide guidelines on how to apply
their approach to assist fossil hunting in other continents.

â€œA chain of ideal conditions must occur for
fossils to form, which means they are extremely rare ? so finding
as many as possible can tell us more of what the past was like, and
why certain species went extinct,â€ says project leader
Professor Corey Bradshaw, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate
Change at the University of Adelaide.

â€œTypically, however, we use haphazard ways to
find fossils. Mostly people just go to excavation sites and
surrounding areas where fossils have been found before. We hope our
models will make it easier for palaeontologists and archaeologists
to identify new fossil sites that could yield vast treasures of
prehistoric information.â€

Research student and lead author SebastiÃ¡n Block and
the team made use of modelling techniques commonly used in ecology.
They modelled past distribution of species, the geological
suitability of fossil preservation, and the likelihood of fossil
discovery in the field. They applied their techniques to a range of
Australian megafauna that became extinct over the last 50,000
years, such as the giant terror bird Genyornis, the
rhino-sized â€˜wombatâ€™
Diprotodon, and the marsupial
â€˜lionâ€™
Thylacoleo.

To produce the species distribution models of these long-extinct
animals, the researchers used â€˜hindcasted global
circulation modelsâ€™ to provide predicted
temperature and rainfall for the deep past, and matched this with
the estimated ages of the fossils.

â€œWhat we did was build a probability map for
each of these layers â€“ the species distribution,
the right sort of geological conditions for fossil formation (for
example, sedimentary rocks, or caves and lakes), and the ease of
discovery (for example, open areas rather than dense
forest),â€ says Professor Bradshaw.
â€œWe combined each of these for an overall
â€˜suitability for fossil
discoveryâ€™ map.â€

â€œOur methods predict potential fossil locations
across an entire continent, which is useful to identify potential
fossil areas far from already known sites,â€ says Kiel
Universityâ€™s Professor Ingmar Unkel.
â€œItâ€™s a good
â€˜exploration filter; after which remote-sensing
approaches and fine-scale expert knowledge could complement the
search.â€

The model showed areas south of Lake Eyre and west of Lake Torrens
in South Australia and a large area around Shark Bay, Western
Australia and other areas in south-western Australia with a high
potential to yield new megafauna fossils.

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